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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24144319">Smile Like You Mean It</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/calapine/pseuds/calapine'>calapine</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Doctor Who, Doctor Who (TV Movie 1996)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/M</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 18:35:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>4,216</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24144319</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/calapine/pseuds/calapine</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>At the end, the Doctor didn't leave.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Eighth Doctor/Grace Holloway</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Smile Like You Mean It</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>First posted on LiveJournal in 2005.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Me, stay with you?” he asked, laughing, smiling, and surprised. He was thinking about it, and in those few seconds you find that your laughter stops, rather suddenly, because he really was thinking about it.</p>
<p>“All right,” he said. Deadly serious.</p>
<p>And you would have panicked if he hadn’t kissed you again.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>“No, no, Mom. Brian moved out.” A pause. The obvious question. “We wanted different things, I had my career...” And that bastard could never quite understand what being on call actually meant. “Don’t worry about the rent...no, there’s someone else here...yes...not a boyfriend exactly...no, not a girlfriend either, he’s just staying here for a few days until he sorts a few things out...he’s a doctor, actually.”</p>
<p>“The Doctor,” corrected a passing voice. Grace rolled her eyes, and then frowned as she realised she’d missed one or two of her mother’s best-avoided pieces of advice.</p>
<p>“Ah, yes, we met at the hospital.” On my operating table, and then I killed him, though it was definitely not my fault. “England. He’s from England, Oxford, actually. He, uh, had a chair there...physics.”</p>
<p>“How did you know?” exclaimed the Doctor with a smile as he passed by again. “I remember Newton...” but she shushed him.</p>
<p>“Uh, he’s just moving a few things in...” Because Brian nicked all our furniture. Yes, he paid for it, but who the hell did he think was paying the rent? And the electric?</p>
<p>“Over here?” asked the Doctor. He was lugging around an over-sized clock that looked as though it had come straight out of a museum backroom without so much as a clean.</p>
<p>“Look, Mom, I’ve really got to go.” Before my apartment ends up looking like Merry Olde England. “Doctor,” said Grace, putting down the phone. “Can you just take it easy. I mean, we don’t need everything fixed up at once.”</p>
<p>“We don’t?” His eyes widened. Child-like.</p>
<p>“No,” she said, lifting the clock out of his hands. “Let’s just grab a coffee.”</p>
<p>“It’s New Year’s Day,” he reminded her.</p>
<p>“Oh. Yeah. That. Forgot, what with...everything.” Because if she said ‘what with Saving The World’ she had the sneaking feeling she’d grin smugly and make a supremely annoying ‘Yes!’ gesture with her fist.</p>
<p>“Don’t worry. I can make coffee,” he said.</p>
<p>“You can?” Of course you can. It’s coffee. Everyone can make coffee. Please say sensible things now.</p>
<p>“Oh yes, I have some delicious beans I picked up in Kenya when I...”</p>
<p>“No!”</p>
<p>“No?”</p>
<p>“I have instant.”</p>
<p>“It’s not Nescafe?” asked the Doctor dubiously.</p>
<p>“I don’t think so, but don’t worry: I’ll make the coffee. You just,” she paused and took a look around her now over-stuffed apartment. “Just find somewhere to sit.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Hot, bitter, and very cheap; coffee never tasted this good. Grace handed the Doctor his cup and sank into one of the tastefully coloured floor cushions that now littered her polished wooden floor.</p>
<p>“Grace?” She glanced up to see him looking at her, all concerned, with warmth and the smallest smile. It would have been enough to make her feel all gooey inside, except she wasn’t that sort of person and right now she just felt really, really tired. “Are you alright?”</p>
<p>“I’m fine, Doctor,” she said. “It’s just all this.” She waves her free arm at the room, with enough vagueness to avoid indicating anything in particular.</p>
<p>“Too much?” he asked gently. He cared, he really did. And she hadn’t quite decided if that was endearing or as annoying as hell.</p>
<p>“Maybe a little,” she conceded, because under that abrasive exterior, she imagined herself a diplomat.</p>
<p>He nodded, taking a suitably thoughtful sip of the coffee.</p>
<p>“I see.” The voice was pure Little Boy Lost, and she was afraid she’d hurt him, but no, he looked up smiling. She smiled back. “It’s just been a long time since I had a home. Other than the TARDIS, I mean. Not since my granddaughter and I...”</p>
<p>“Granddaughter!” she spluttered. Darn, coffee on the cushions and she hadn’t a clue how to remove it. She glanced at him to see that his eyebrows had ascended a few millimetres, just enough to make him look amused. “It’s so nice when things like that just slip out.”</p>
<p>“Don’t worry she’s a few decades ahead of us now.”</p>
<p>“I’m not going to ask.”</p>
<p>“It’s a good story.”</p>
<p>“And this is an awful lot of stuff, and it can’t all stay. So finish the coffee and we can decide what’s going back in the TARDIS.”</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Grace arrived home, exhausted, her hands still feeling like they were drenched in blood. It hadn’t taken the hospital long to decide that she was actually a very good doctor and they’d very much like to have her back. They bribed her, of course, and she wasn’t going to be churlish about more pay and more holidays.</p>
<p>But she could live without kids dying on her table.</p>
<p>“Doctor!” she called, dropping her bag by the door. Keys were thrown at the table and coat was flung on its hook. She pushed thoughts of the hospital to the back of her mind.</p>
<p>He was here, of course, the air was thick with the scents of cooking. Something nice, she assumed, if it tasted as good as it smelt.</p>
<p>“Grace!” he greeted her, his head appearing round the door, attached to a very pleased with itself smile.</p>
<p>Her hand flew to her mouth to try and cover her sudden laugh.</p>
<p>“What?” he asked, indignant.</p>
<p>“Nice hat,” she said as levelly as she could manage, her eyes now fixed on the tall white monstrosity perched atop the Doctor’s brown curls.</p>
<p>“Do you like it?”</p>
<p>“I...ah, yes, very nice. Matches the apron.”</p>
<p>“Come on, I’ve got something new. I think you’ll like it,” he said, taking her arm and guiding he through to their kitchen. Her eyes just drifted across all the cooking apparatus strewn across the work surfaces.</p>
<p>“You should be a chef.”</p>
<p>“Really, do you think so?” And she shakes her head at the thoughtful look that has suddenly appeared on his face.</p>
<p>There was wine and candles and Grace was far too tired and thinking of dead bodies to make any comments about all the usual clichés.</p>
<p>“I thought you were a vegetarian,” she said stabbing her knife into the steak.</p>
<p>“I am,” he replied and Grace stopped chewing, coughed once and raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Oh, it’s not meat, it’s a plant.”</p>
<p>She finishes chewing and swallows, before saying, “Alright, I’ll bite.” She looks down at the steak. “Again. Where’s it from?”</p>
<p>“Soonatrus. Off in one of the far spirals of your galaxy.”</p>
<p>“Today. You were away today?” Not quite an accusation.</p>
<p>Guilt melted through the Doctor’s unexpressive mask. “Ah, yes, just a short trip.”</p>
<p>“How long?”</p>
<p>“An hour or two,” he said.</p>
<p>“Uh-huh.” I don’t believe you. You’re an awful liar, Doctor.</p>
<p>“Left at two, just after you got that call to...”</p>
<p>“You were waiting for me to leave!”</p>
<p>“It was a surprise, Grace,” he said calmly.</p>
<p>“I thought we agreed...”</p>
<p>“It was one little trip.”</p>
<p>“So you got back at, what? Four?” He didn’t even bother to hide the guilt this time. Her cutlery clattered onto the table and she stood up.</p>
<p>“I used the fast return switch, I was back as soon as I left. It’s just easier that way, I wouldn’t make any mistakes. Grace...Grace...” He jumped up and followed her out of the kitchen. “Grace, please, listen to me. If I had to work to relative time I could have made a mistake. A million light years...a million years...a few seconds too early and then I’d have the High Council breathing down my neck. I’ve never had to do this before, it hasn’t mattered, but now...I didn’t want to make a mistake.”</p>
<p>“Bit late,” she snapped, flopping into an armchair. “We talked about this, didn’t we? I mean how long were you away for?”</p>
<p>“A few hours...maybe a day...”</p>
<p>“A day!” she exclaimed.</p>
<p>“I was distracted. I didn’t mean...” he stopped. He didn’t want to ramble again. A deep breath. “I didn’t mean for it to be so long.”</p>
<p>“I’ll bet you didn’t. We talked about this, damn it. I trusted you.” Because you’ll go away and yes, you’ll get distracted and you’ll forget. You’ll think just a few days, just a week, a year. I’m a Time Lord, it doesn’t matter. Plenty of time. “You said so yourself, you’ll forget to come back.”</p>
<p>“I didn’t forget,” he said, very quietly.</p>
<p>“What about next time?” she asked.</p>
<p>So he gave her the TARDIS key because she didn’t ask for it, and they went back to dinner to eat and talk without listening. It was easier to for her to pay attention to her thoughts, busy telling her that everything was going to be all right.</p>
<p>She admitted to herself that she didn’t quite understand what it was that was going on. They were living together, but mostly in separate rooms. He cooked her meals and she took him to her favourite theatre. And they never ever talked about what they were doing because she was scared that he was going to leave and he was scared that he wasn’t. Probably. Symmetry appealed.</p>
<p>But it was comfortable, and that was a relief for both of them.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>A sort of constant bewilderment had enveloped the Doctor as Grace had tried to explain what he needed to do in order to work in America.</p>
<p>“I’m sort of British,” he said occasionally, as they tried to hunt down all the identification that would let him have money and pay taxes and not be deported.</p>
<p>As it turned out, this was not entirely the nightmare that Grace had imagined. The Doctor knew people, and not the nice, ordinary type that Grace was familiar with. They were all important and old and spoke with the kind of English accent that you sort of expected all Brits to have and were secretly disappointed when you found out that TV had lied to you.</p>
<p>She rolled her eyes when she found out that he had called himself John Smith, and asked an awful lot of questions that he didn’t really answer about the organisation that had employed him and given him all the useful bits of paper that they needed now.</p>
<p>The first real problem was the photo identification. The second was that the Doctor had to be at least fifty years old, when he looked less than forty and was really over a millennium. Grace was very glad that he liked to make cups of tea, because this was all going to drive her crazy without something to clutch hold of and a cup of tea was comfortingly warm.</p>
<p>Sometimes the Doctor gave up too and abandoned diplomacy to roll over public officials with the sort of charm that had a lovely way of flattening all objections.</p>
<p>“Please, please, please don’t lose your social security number,” Grace said to him when it was all over.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>The same day that she had the TARDIS moved into the garden and set about trying to disguise a British police box as a sort of over-sized blue gnome, the Doctor took over the box room.</p>
<p>She found out when she went inside to wash the dirt of her hands and take a shower. Her hall was full of all the boxes that she’d been meaning to unpack ever since she and Brian had moved in. There was nothing useful in them, but everything was too sentimental or too expensive to throw away.</p>
<p>“Doctor?” Oh, she was worried, because every time she said his name it seemed to sound more and more like a whine. “Doctor?” she tried again, much more upbeat. She felt an awful lot better about herself. He appeared from behind the open door.</p>
<p>“I’ll need the key,” he said, apologetic, but there was no way he’d accept no for an answer.</p>
<p>“Alright.” She unclasped her necklace. She’d taken to wearing the key on a silver chain.</p>
<p>“Come with me, if you like,” he said, and then stopped talking. She followed him into the garden, her mind racing to try and work out what he hadn’t said. She hadn’t been inside the TARDIS for months, not since The Incident, or, if she was in a more cheerful mood, The Day I Saved the World.</p>
<p>It was still the same inside, of course it was, and the Doctor didn’t even glance at the console. She shivered as she followed him though the corridors; the lighting was dark, ominous and she felt that it was for her benefit. The TARDIS didn’t like her anymore.</p>
<p>“Is this going to take long?” asked Grace.</p>
<p>“Mmm.” The Doctor was ducking into a room every so often, sneezing as the dust of centuries was unsettled with his searching. “I’ll have to find the right equipment, I know it’s around here somewhere. I thought I might use the box room as a laboratory of sorts. One or two things have popped up at work.”</p>
<p>She frowned, biting off the “I wished you’d asked me,” for all sorts of reasons and every single one of them was a little nibble of guilt. Instead, she said, “How come you can't just use the kitchen?” Because working as a chef didn’t require a lab, surely? Even a makeshift, amateur lab in one of the smallest box rooms known to man.</p>
<p>“Ah, well, I had a few rather interesting ideas. But I’m not entirely sure about whether or not it would be digestible to your species. I don’t want to add to your workload.” He glanced up and grinned.</p>
<p>“Oh.” And she promised herself that one day she’d meet the Doctor’s boss and find out if he was as insane as she imagined him to be.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>One of the terribly important British people came to visit that fall, and she had never seen the Doctor quite this enthusiastic about making tea as she showed their visitor through to the lounge.</p>
<p>“So who is he?” she whispered coming into the kitchen and taking one of the Doctor’s cakes out of the cupboard.</p>
<p>“My very best...British friend,” said the Doctor, as they took the tea and cake through, and the Doctor poured with all the elegance of an English nanny in the 1930s. “Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, this is Doctor Grace Holloway.”</p>
<p>“Pleased to meet you,” said the Brigadier, shaking her hand.</p>
<p>“And you,” said Grace. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”</p>
<p>“Oh?”</p>
<p>“All good, Alistair,” said the Doctor, still grinning like an idiot.</p>
<p>“Hmm. Well, I must admit it came as something of a surprise to find out that you were staying on Earth, Doctor, and in America. You haven’t been exiled again, have you?” he asked, with a quirk of an eyebrow.</p>
<p>“Ah. Aha...no, no, nothing like that. I’ve just decided to try something different.” Grace noted the Brigadier’s eyes flicking between her and the Doctor, the awkward cough, the smile...no, half-smile and almost shrug. The British were odd. “And this isn’t a social call, is it?”</p>
<p>“I wish it was, Doctor, really. Ever since they found out you’re back, UNIT have been trying to get you back in the country.”</p>
<p>“I haven’t heard anything.”</p>
<p>“No, you wouldn’t have. I stopped them. I might be retired, well, semi-retired, but they still listen to me. There was nothing going on that we couldn’t handle by ourselves, and if we can, we should. They just wanted easier answers, save them a lot of work.”</p>
<p>“But now there’s something bigger?”</p>
<p>The Brigadier nodded and took a sip of tea. “I wanted to come personally so you’d know it was serious.”</p>
<p>“All right, Alistair, I’m listening.”</p>
<p>So Grace felt like she was eavesdropping, but that didn’t mean she was going to leave the room. Really what she wanted to do was throw the Doctor out and throw the Brigadier against the wall (and kiss him, joked a very odd part of her brain) and demand that he tell her everything he knew about the Doctor, because these two men had known each other forever as far as the Doctor was concerned. Over a thousand years and eight lives and every one connected with this man in some way. Bizarre, but he seemed to think it was perfectly normal which was sort of nice and helpful.</p>
<p>She went with them to London, then north to Wales. Somewhere along the way she acquired a useful little pass card that identified her as a member of UNIT and she just knew that the CIA were going to do something nasty to her when she got home.</p>
<p>She remembered the cold and dark and an awful lot of dead people. Dead and green and oozing, and thank goodness she was a doctor because she’d seen worse. Oh yes you have, she insisted to herself, whenever she felt a wave a nausea. But she was helping, because the Doctor’s idea of scientific method was just a little haphazard and he seemed to think that luck was his due.</p>
<p>Nobody told her that there were going to be aliens shooting at her.</p>
<p>Nobody told her that the alien ammunition carried the spores that were killing these people.</p>
<p>Nobody told her having an alien organism growing inside you and killing you was going to hurt quite so much.</p>
<p>When the Doctor told her she was going to be all right, she believed him.</p>
<p>After all, he was working for a cure off her notes.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>Very shortly after that everything stopped pretending to be ordinary.</p>
<p>After the UNIT incident a lot of aliens found out where the Doctor was, and they all seemed to be very interested in meeting him.</p>
<p>There was a dark-haired man sipping wine in the kitchen when she got home from work, he smiled and poured her a glass, which she declined.</p>
<p>“Where is he?” he asked mildly.</p>
<p>“Getting milk,” she’d deadpanned, though it was probably true.</p>
<p>She’d gotten a nasty smile and a staser blast in her leg for her trouble.</p>
<p>The next week they ended up captured in her second favourite restaurant during dessert. A tribe of giant walking Furbies had decided that nothing was more important than eating all the patrons, until the Doctor convinced them that it would be a very bad idea indeed.</p>
<p>Before that they had wandered around a very grey and cold spaceship for several hours.</p>
<p>And before that Grace had been stuck in a cell for a good thirty minutes before the Doctor got her out.</p>
<p>And all that was after the very long walk to their rather obvious Furby shuttle that the police had definitely noticed and there was an awful lot of shooting.</p>
<p>The next time the UNIT Brigadier visited, Grace went shopping. The house was silent by the time she got back, and she fell asleep on the sofa with an empty box of tissues sitting in front of her.</p>
<p>When the Doctor returned he looked as tired as she felt.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry,” he whispered and they collapsed into a hug, an embrace, and he kissed her with all the care and delicacy and enthusiasm that she remembered from the very first time.</p>
<p>The next morning they went into the witness protection program. It seemed to work, and she didn’t see any aliens for enough weeks to make her feel safe.</p>
<p>Somehow the Doctor’s new boss appeared to be as understanding as the last one. It wasn’t so easy for Grace, but she got a job at their new local hospital and it wasn’t long before they too realised that she really was a very good doctor indeed.</p>
<p>And every time UNIT contacted them, the Doctor spoke to her first. She got used to it, soon enough, and she had to admit that there was a certain amount of satisfaction when your weekend hobby involved saving the world.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>England really was a very quaint place, but Grace got used to it. The jet lag was another matter, and she really wished that sometimes the aliens would invade her side of the world. Except when they did they usually ended up at her house, so she knew perfectly well that the grass wasn’t any greener, but that didn’t stop her complaining when she felt like it was three o’clock in the morning and the Doctor was bouncing around her.</p>
<p>“I knew there was a reason I don’t do research,” muttered Grace, scribbling onto her notepad. She wasn’t as irritated as she sounded, because it really was much nicer when she had some knowledge of what they were fighting: an alien infection in the water system was something that she could understand.</p>
<p>It was better than emergency surgery when the UNIT soldiers got into a pitched battle and she was one of the few doctors they could trust with the more exotic injuries.</p>
<p>“More tea?” asked the Doctor as he placed another mug on the lab bench in front of her.</p>
<p>“It’s so damn tedious. Though, yes, the whole alien thing is sort of interesting, but I’m out of my depth the entire time.”</p>
<p>“Milk, two sugars, very strong.”</p>
<p>“And these UNIT people just don’t seem to have the funding for proper equipment. Or is this your stuff?”</p>
<p>“Though it’s probably a bit hot.”</p>
<p>Grace looked up. “Are you listening to me?”</p>
<p>“Tea,” said the Doctor and pointed at the mug.</p>
<p>“Thanks.” She swallowed a mouthful and grimaced. This was not the sort of tea that she liked, but it was the sort that kept her awake and alert when she should be asleep. She eyed him over the top of her mug. The Doctor always seemed so much more alive when they were on these trips, so much more vibrant, even if they were on the verge of the abyss more often than not.</p>
<p>It was kinda scary.</p>
<p>“I need a break,” she admitted, stepping away from the microscope. The Doctor took over before she asked, and he didn’t need to make any notes, or write out any calculations and she watched him for over an hour as he went through the tedious task of testing samples without a single pause or complaint.</p>
<p>“So what happens when you go away?” she asked.</p>
<p>“Nature abhors a vacuum,” he murmured.</p>
<p>“Right. So someone else does all this? There’s nobody qualified.”</p>
<p>The Doctor sat up, thinking for a moment. “I seem to attract attention,” he said.</p>
<p>“I’d noticed.” She yawned and stretched. “We’re not going to get back this week, are we?”</p>
<p>“Probably not,” admitted the Doctor. “Once we’ve stopped the root cause, they’ll be the contamination to deal with.”</p>
<p>“Right,” she said, thinking <i>I just want to go home.</i></p>
<p>And she really wished that she’d said no to UNIT the very first time, because now there was always something that they needed the Doctor for, and it seemed so petty to refuse. She saved lives every day, but they seemed to be saving all their lives every day.</p>
<p>Perspective was not her friend.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>So she didn’t really notice that she was crying more often. And she didn’t really notice that seeing people die in nice ordinary ways on her operating table was becoming a comfort. And she didn’t really understand why she found herself spending more and more time watching him sitting in the garden and staring at an alien blue box. And her house was very, very quiet.</p>
<p>She didn’t realise until:</p>
<p>“Can you live like this?” he asked her. “Do you want the responsibility of saving the world?”</p>
<p>She blinked. He was asking her this now? A little late, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>“Saving the world is easy, Doctor. I’ve done it, what? Three times now.” She paused, not wanting to ask, but he did ask her, ask her the very question he was most afraid of. She had to do the same. Of course she did. “What about you? Can you stay here? One place? One time?”</p>
<p>Pause, pause, pause, and it was all going to go so horribly wrong, because he said, “Grace, come with me.”</p>
<p>“You didn’t answer my question.”</p>
<p>“I’ve tried, Grace, I’ve tried.”</p>
<p>“I know...”</p>
<p>“Come with me,” he repeated. “I tried things your way. I followed your path. Please, could you...?” He left the question unfinished, hanging there between them, ready for her to take, and it would be so very easy.</p>
<p>“I have a life here.” I save lives here.</p>
<p>“And my life’s out there, Grace. Please, there’s so much more out there.”</p>
<p>“And there’s nothing I want,” she said. “This is my home.”</p>
<p>“I understand.”</p>
<p>“You’re a terrible liar, Doctor,” she told him. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but you didn’t find it here.”</p>
<p>“I thought I had.”</p>
<p>“I know.”</p>
<p>And that night she took off her necklace and left it sitting on the cabinet on his side of the bed.</p>
<p>+++</p>
<p>You could see his long, thin fingers forming the unmistakable handwriting. Elegant, swirling, not quite pretentious. And you did not cry as you read it. You knew what it would say. You’d known for days, weeks perhaps. How honest do you want to be with yourself?</p>
<p>Of course, his note didn’t say goodbye.</p>
<p>It didn’t have to.</p>
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